For more clarity on what can happen in organizations that are antagonistic to hierarchy and structure, I can think of no better read than “The Tyranny of structurelessness” by Jo Feeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
That happened to Occupy Wall Street, and to Black Lives Matter. Both failed to focus on specific, achievable goals. And so, they never got beyond the consciousness raising stage. If Occupy Wall Street had focused on "Tax the 1%" and "Break up monopoly landlords", and Black Lives Matter had focused on "Every killing by a cop gets investigated by the FBI" and "Fire the bottom 10% of cops", they might have achieved those goals.
My impression is that the movement gets co-opted as a generic partisan force, and then having specific goals is a detriment when the unstated goal is merely to elect a particular party.
The best goal for Occupy Wall Street would have been to break up all the Too Big To Fail institutions. The "problem" with that was twofold.
One, if that's the goal, and they manage to turn the election, then they'll expect the people they elected to actually do it. But politicians didn't wanna do it. Both parties are in the pocket of the banks.
And two, if they actually did do it, it would be done. The movement would have succeeded and lost its raison d'etre. If you solve the problem then you can't run on it again.
So you're completely right. The question is how to prevent movements from getting co-opted like this. Because actually solving the problem is the thing we should want.
BLM wasn't formed in response to police violence, so if it was to limit itself to a narrow tactical policy aim, those would have been odd choices.
Also, BLM has arguably had a broader and more substantial impact already than achieving either one of those narrow goals would have.
???
Do you have references to that?
I understand that BLM prominence started with the Ferguson protests against cop Darren Wilson murdering Michael Brown Jr
(Ps, forgot about Zimmerman murdering Trayvon. But that's also a cop-adjacent figure. What most people would define a vigilante)
Yes, it became prominent then because it was already well established with a network of activists, etc.; the principal triggering event (as your PS seems to acknowledge) was the slaying of Trayvon Martin.
> But that's also a cop-adjacent figure.
That may be a valid viewpoint, but it's not the fact that BLM organized around, which was the lack of accountability and the identity of the victim, not anything about the personal characteristics or background of the perpetrator.
“Police”.
> You're both saying that BLM was founded and organized around the lack of police accountability when killing black people
No, “police” was not part of the founding focus. Events involving police just happened to be the ones that brought the network to mass attention, after it was founded in response to a non-police (even if some might see it as “police adjacent”) killing with a focus that was not in any way focussed on whether those responsible but not held accountable were police, or “police adjacent”.
Courts of law are institutions of government, and surprisingly enough people sometimes disagree with the jobs done by institutions of government.
I'm sorry but I feel like this author is really out of touch here. Perhaps to someone who only interacted with it through the news, it seemed like they didn't get anything done. But that energy didn't just dissipate. It spread to almost every facet of American leftist organizing
Also saying Graeber gave us occupy is giving a lot more credit to him than I think is fair. And I think Occupy introduced a lot more people to Graeber than Graeber introduced to Occupy
And did you miss the 60's?
I didn't realize that Occupy had helped labor organizing.
Does leftist theory really help when trying to organize a business?
Ummm… the 60’s would like to have a word with you. You’re clearly lack some significant history lessons.
Dictatorial control only prevents this for institutions small enough for the dictator to fully understand every part of the organization.
Without that, you get middle managers jockeying for position and playing CYA and the people at the top are too far away from it to put a stop to it.
In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things.
There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.
This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry.
You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for.
If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.
Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through.
Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit.
Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?
These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar.
The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often.
And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.
Managers are also aware of their company's market position. If the new Camaro didn't sell, GM was still going to exist. If the Model 3 didn't sell, Tesla was toast. A middle manager who bankrupts the company inherently loses their job, so people are less inclined to play stupid games when that's what's on the line.
Companies doing novel things are also able to retain employees who believe in the mission even when the big boss is a fire breathing dragon. You put the same kind of boss in charge of the DMV or the cable company and people are just going to quit, or exert political pressure against the boss.
This points to antitrust as a solution. Constrain mergers and vertical integration. Then companies that become bureaucratically inefficient actually fail and go away, solving the problem. And that possibility was always the primary deterrent to it happening, which is why it happens so much more when that isn't on the table.
Apple has 150k employees and runs mostly like a dictatorship with very long ruler at the top that has a lot of power and a generally consistent long-term version they’re executing on. Distributed decision making might be a bit stronger but there’s also no real laws to speak of with lots of forgiveness if things turn out well.
Also the motives are drastically different. Government is about creating the best structure for a bunch of humans to cohabitate with a shared value system. Corporations typically are about amassing power, wealth, and influence over governments.
I hate to bring this up but just think how differently things would have played out if the JFK assassination did not happen. I don't believe the conspiracy theories and so I consider it a black swan event. Where are we suffering from government sabotage today? Would BLM have turned out differently? Would we have even needed it in the first place if prior sabotage events didn't happen? Anyway this is leading into conspiracy territory but I just was wondering out loud.
Well it certainly didn't overcome all events. The FBI violently executed the leadership of the Black Panthers through local police that had 0 repercussions for their (very illegal) actions. Cultural groups in the south like the Daughters of the Confederacy really ramped up their culture war and made sure to filter all history textbooks, put up monuments, etc. Cops have been able to kill black folks and totally get away with it for decades now
Imagine where we could be if Huey Newton did actually get elected to local politics. Or if the South didn't ramp up their culture war
The processes in this document sound utterly familiar.
I think this manual is most appropriately understood as an early reference for the operations of the FBI in COINTELPRO, etc. State employed agents-provocateur and saboteurs were some of the first to literally use these exact reference manuals domestically, and their targets were the various social and labor movements of the day.